This week we're setting Ahn'Qiraj's Princess Huhuran against the Pit Lord Magtheridon. Want to tell us who would win and who would lose? Keep reading for the details!
Two Bosses Enter: Princess Huhuran vs. Magtheridon
This week we're setting Ahn'Qiraj's Princess Huhuran against the Pit Lord Magtheridon. Want to tell us who would win and who would lose? Keep reading for the details!
Continue reading Two Bosses Enter: Princess Huhuran vs. Magtheridon
Know Your Lore: Sargeras
Hard to believe that this friendly soul over to the right stabbing what appears to be an entire planet was once not just a good guy, but indeed, the goodest of the good guys, huh? (Goodest of the good guys? What, am I a drunken five year old all of a sudden? Sheesh, that's just horrible.) But it's true: the ultimate big bad guy in the Warcraft Universe, the ultimate evil, the guy who comes up with plans that involve possessing babies was once the champion of the Titans themselves, before he started stabbing planets and possessing babies.I guess there's no evil, be it big or small, that Sargeras won't engage in personally. He's a real hands on villain.
So what's the deal with Sargeras, exactly? How did he go bad? Why did he assemble the Burning Legion in the first place? And what's he up to nowadays? With the Legion running around being killed for loot and Marks of Sargeras in Outland (seriously, what is the big plan for Outland, exactly? So far all the Legion seems to be doing is being mad at Illidan because he promised to be Kil'Jaeden's BFF and then went back on it. Did they pinky swear? I bet they pinky swore. That seems like the kind of thing Kil'Jaeden would do) you'd think ol' Sargy would be in the thick of it, but instead his sidekicks are running the show and he's nowhere to be found. Why?
It doesn't help that some of Sargeras' history has changed in the telling. (Hey, I like the Draenei a lot, but you guys really changed the lore around.)
Well, you may have a hard time believing this, but it turns out that his whole baby possession scheme wasn't such a good idea after all. I know, I know, how could picking on an infant have gone so horribly wrong? But rather than dwelling on that, why don't we start talking about Sargeras' early days.
Hallow's End quest guides for 2007
Hallow's End has grown quite a bit this year. Adding to the old favorites of Innkeep Trick or Treating, PvP Smoke Bombing and Wickerman raids is the new Daily Quest to trigger the 5-man Headless Horseman event in the Scarlet Monastery graveyard wing. Considering this new mob drops Flying Broom Mounts, Evil Pumpkin Pets and Purple Jewelry, you can guess that he is going to be quite popular with the players.
New guides on defeating the Headless Horseman have sprung up around the Net. The fight doesn't seem too difficult for a group of L70s, but you can get an overview of all three phases and the loot table and WoW Wiki.
Also check out this excellent Hallow's End guide that covers all the activities for the holiday and lists the reputation gains and item rewards associated with each quest. Now put on your scary face and go get some Hallow's End goodies.
Fun with the Gnome goggles, and a request
But if you've been listening to the podcast, you'll know that there's one thing I haven't seen yet, and that I can't wait to see it. Someone, somewhere, please wear the Gnome goggles, and go down Illidan. I'm a Horde player, so I just can't do it, but surely there's some Alliance player out there who had some Brewfest fun in between raiding the Black Temple, and surely they can take the goggles on an Illidan run, and record the hilarious video results. I don't know what I can put on this for a bounty, but you tell me-- prizes? A promise to write about something of your choice on the blog? A callout on the podcast? Someone please go to see Illidan with the Gnome goggles on, and send us the FRAPS of it-- I'm just not prepared for how incredibly awesome that would be.
Update: Aww, that's a bummer. Looks like Illidan don't play that game, homey. Looks like the dream is lost forever. Oh well. Thanks anyway, so2!
PTR Notes: Pet in position
Mania's Arcania is at it again with the Hunter testing. This time, she heard in the 2.3 patch notes that pets will apparently always try to fight from behind their target (thus supposedly removing Parry and Block from the hit table for those attacks, but apparently that's not always 100% either), and she decided to test it out.When her pet was tanking, she didn't see a change. That seems obvious-- if the pet holds the highest aggro, it would be pointless for them to run around in circles to try and get behind a mob. Unless the target was somehow stunned (Rogues use that tactic all the time, of course), but she didn't say that she was able to test that case at all.
But when she or someone else was tanking, sure enough, the pet slowly circled around to the side of the enemy (which, I believe counts as "the back" in terms of theorycrafting), and attacked there. The problem was that the pet did move slowly, and during the whole time spent positioning, wasn't attacking at all.
It sounds like Blizzard is trying to get some complicated code down here, and I wonder if the result is really worth the effort. But then again, for Hunters who raid, a buff to their pet's attack like this is probably very welcome. And the real reason for this change probably has nothing to do with attacking from behind anyway-- despite the short loss of DPS, keeping pets out of frontal AoE and cleave attacks is definitely a terrific benefit.
BigRedKitty: A Video Special Event
Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.
We'd like to present for your entertainment pleasure a short movie of a hunter's perspective of the Moroes pull in Karazhan. The concept behind this project was to give hunters a visual guide for what their roles and responsibilities are, and the skill-set they can bring to a raid.
Your feedback will be most appreciated. Download the 48MB wide-screen version here.
Daniel Howell continues his quest to become the WoW-Scorsese as the hunter-pet duo extraordinaire known to lore as BigRedKitty. More of his theorycrafting and slanderous belittling of the lesser classes can be found at bigredkitty.blogspot.com.
Tauren cat form updated a little in patch 2.3
Beaux on the US forums showed everyone how, in patch 2.3, Blizzard has modified the tauren cat form's face to look more like a lion and less like a monkey, and changed the neck of the lion so that it doesn't look so hunchbacked as it moves. It's not as pretty as the tauren cat form suggestion submitted in Blizzard's art contest, but it'll do for now I would think.
[Update]: Our reader tmklein supplied us with some interesting links for what the EU player Andrige thought the various forms should look like -- all with a distinct visual style. Would you like this sort of change?
- Dire Bear Forms
- Worgen Forms (to replace cat form? I don't know about this one...)
- Travel Forms
An argument for permanent death
I'm all about good ideas to improve the game we all love. I've even been known to toss them out to you folks on occasion. This morning though, in my morning perousal of the internets, I found a blog entry that just about made my eyes pop out of my head.Our good west-coast friend Cap'n Jack posted a couple of ideas yesterday that certainly had the benefit of being novel, if not extreme. While I don't think my head can completely wrap itself around his first PvP-themed suggestion, I'm really intrigued at his second idea: Permadeath.
That's right folks. The Cap'n is suggesting that once you die, you're dead. If you can't find a benevolent druid, shaman, priest, paladin, or an engineer with a set of jumper cables within thirty minutes of death you're toast. Game over. Thanks for playing. We'll see you at the character creation screen momentarily. Jack further proposes that if the grim reaper does defeat you, that you would be allowed to start the character over at Level 1 naked and without skills, but retaining your name, your race, your class, and -- most importantly -- your ignore list.
While even my wildest imagination cannot fathom the amount of hate comments I'm going to get over this article, I should state that I don't agree with 100% with John, I'm just presenting his idea for discussion. As a longtime MMOG player, I've seen the penalty for death gradually diminish from year to year and game to game. While I might not be entirely in John's corner on this issue I can agree that some more "serious" penalties for death might be refreshing. What are your thoughts? I'll be hiding in the WoW Insider bomb shelter. Let me know when the coast is clear.
Forum Post of the Day: Worst NPC names
Personally, I never liked the names of the auctioneers in Ironforge-- Redmuse confused me at first, and Lympkin sounds like some kind of disease. And Fandral Staghelm is not only a jerk of the highest order, but his name sounds dumb, too. Who names their kid Fandral?
What's the worst NPC name you've seen in the game?
Beowulf movie contest: Win free WoW for a year!
The folks at Blizzard have teamed up with Robert Zemeckis and Paramount Pictures to provide you with the opportunity to win a free year World of Warcraft subscription by creatively arranging your screenshots (we know you have them) for their new World of Warcraft Legendary Tales Photo-Journalism Contest. I happen to think this is pretty awesome, if only because I try and take a lot of screenshots. Also, I happen to be looking forward to seeing what Ray Winstone does as Beowulf. Especially since he'll be a digitally animated version of himself. I'm starting to understand why the folks at Blizzard were a natural fit for this movie. (Note, I have no idea if it will be good or not, the last time I saw a Beowulf movie, Christopher Lambert was in it.)The contest rules, written in dreaded legalese, are here. If you're a resident of one of the 48 US States eligible for this contest (sorry, Florida and Rhode Island... if it makes you feel any better, I'm from Rhode Island so I cry alongside you) then you should get busy taking some screenshots and enter. I'm sure there's some monster or another you could be killing right now.
Epic gear coming to Scarlet Monastery (and elsewhere)
Here's a little change I missed in the midlevel updates notes: Epic gear will now drop for lowbies. Example number one is the Deadman's Hand, which will drop from Arcanist Doan in SM, and has a proc that "freezes" attackers for a full three seconds. Hawt! Eyonix, who's poking around the forums today after a long absence, confirms that the proc will scale with level, which means it'll be basically useless by 70.But still-- Epic gear for lowbies! What is the world coming to? A quick search on Wowhead doesn't bring anything else new yet that I can see (lots of Epic turn-ins and the old World Drops that we already know about), but this can't be the only Epic they're adding to the lowbie dungeons-- I'm sure we'll see lots more pop up as more people test the PTR and the patch eventually goes live.
Yes, giving Epics to folks who haven't hit even 50 yet might seem a little strange-- just how epic can a piece of equipment be if a knockover like Arcanist Doan can hang on to it? But it's more than worth it, as even lowbies running instances should have a chance to know what it feels like to loot a boss-- and find some of those tasty Professor Plums.
WoW Moviewatch: The Big Boom
Mike Spiff Booth continues to make machinima music videos that I enjoy. The Big Boom is the latest, featuring another song by Jonathan Coulton.
Also, this one is less creepy than the one I featured last time!
Previously on Moviewatch...
Also, this one is less creepy than the one I featured last time!
Previously on Moviewatch...
Paying your dues with guild taxes
Now that guild banks are incoming to the game, what's missing from our little virtual economy system? Taxes! That's what Noplat suggests, anyway-- he says that now that guilds have a place to store up their own central banks, the next step is to require payments from guild members for various guild running costs.I'm not quite sure I agree-- most guilds don't require anything like this. The biggest costs I can think of simply involve raiding repairs, and not only is not every member of every guild involved with raiding, but repair costs aren't that big a deal anyway, especially with daily quests throwing out money for just a few minutes' work. There may be costs coming in the game (guild housing would obviously require a lot of money, and we still haven't been told how siege weapons might work in guild battlegrounds-- will we have to buy those?), but at this point, we don't really need guild taxes or membership fees.
The closest thing my guild ever did to a membership tax is that they ask everyone to pay a few g to any engineer that drops a repair bot during a raid (to cover those costs), but considering how the new instances are set up, I haven't seen a repair bot need to be dropped for a long time anyway. Does your guild need enough money to require membership fees or taxes? And if so, for what? Potions?
Around Azeroth: Have you noticed...?
Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing a copy to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com, with as much or as little detail as you'd like to share with the world!
Gallery: Around Azeroth
Breakfast Topic: WoWing console style
Mike's post yesterday about playing WoW with an XBox controller got me thinking. Now, I honestly prefer playing certain kinds of games on the PC, MMOs topping that list. But if Blizzard up and decided tomorrow to change their minds about a console (which they aren't) version of World of Warcraft, I wonder what it would be like. Exactly how much would the game change once it was ported? And which console would WoW be most at home on?We've seen how it might be done on the XBox. Part of me says the PS3 would be an excellent choice, with the massive graphics rendering capabilities, there would never be any lag in Shattrath, evar. But what about the Wii? Would swinging your sword be more enjoyable than hitting the button on the keyboard? And how exactly would one cast a spell, wave around the Wiimote like Cinderella's fairy godmother?
What do you think? Exactly how well would WoW work on a console?
